In 2002, Bush signed a secret presidential order which authorzied
the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop on phones and emails of
Americans without warrants. The NSA previously had to get a warrant
from a secret court called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,
but apparently secret courts aren’t enough for the Bush regime.
Furthermore, as one former senior official put it, “This is really a
sea change. It’s almost a mainstay of this
country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches.” Giving the NSA
this kind of sweeping power to spy on people inside the US is also a
rollback of gains won through the resistance movements of the
1960’s, when outrageous spying and attacks on the anti-war and civil
rights movements by intelligence agencies were exposed and led to legal
restrictions on such agencies.
With this secret order, the Bush regime
has ripped up established legal norms and created more of the
scaffolding of a police state, with the NSA now spying on as many as
500 Americans at any given time, without any warrants or legal
procedures. All this is justified and kept secret under the
justification of the “war on terrorism.” Are these fascistic measures
ordered and carried out by the Bush regime making you or the world any
safer?
In
case one instance of newfound police state measures this week isn’t
enough to convince of the need to stand up and drive out this criminal regime, how
about two?
NBC
News this week revealed that the Defense Department has been building a
database which includes 1,500 “threats” and “suspicious incidents”. One
such “threat” was a small meeting of a peace group called The Truth
Project at a Quaker House in Florida planning protests against military
recruitment at high schools. The database includes information on
dozens of anti-war activities, and the Defense Department keeps these
records even after it decides such protests are not threats, but Constitutionally protected free speech. In a
nutshell, the military is now spying on people inside the US involved
in protesting the unjust war that the Bush regime is carrying out in Iraq. That which you will not resist and mobilize to stop, you will learn – or be forced – to accept.
The World Can’t Wait! Drive Out the Bush Regime!
(sources:
“Bush Lets US Spy on Callers Without Courts”, NY Times, 12/16; “Is the
Pentagon Spying on Americans?”, NBC News, 12/14)